L.A. Mayor Eric Garcetti on Dr. Seuss: 'There Is No Place for Racist Imagery'

Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti said that “there is no place for racist imagery” when asked to respond to the ongoing controversy about Dr. Seuss, whom the city has honored in the past.

The company that handles Dr. Seuss’s books withdrew six of his books from publication this week over concerns about early caricatures, and the left has been critical of Dr. Seuss for preaching racial tolerance without concern for “structural power imbalances.”

Breitbart News asked Garcetti about the issue during a press briefing on Thursday night.

Of course, there are images that are blatantly racist that have no place in 2021. And you can’t just look at a book and say, “Hey, 99% of this is great,” and there is a blatantly racist picture of somebody who is presumed to be Chinese or African. So, I know there is this whole back-and-forth about whether people are canceling folks. This is not about canceling. This is about standing up against blatant racism where we see it, and just making sure that that no longer is part of our canon. And there’s lots of ways to work around that. People can take pages out, or change them — in fact, I think, a long time before this, it’s not a 2021 event, I think there was even a word changed in a Dr. Seuss book that made it a less offensive term.  I’m not going to prescribe how it gets resolved, but there’s no place for racist imagery, racist language, in 2021 for our children.

Garcetti offered a hopeful assessment of L.A”s prospects as coronavirus cases declined and vaccinations increased, saying there was “light at the end of the tunnel.”

He said his favorite Dr. Seuss book was Yertle the Turtle.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.